Saturday, March 07, 2015

This class is flying by, only one session left! We are working on a flower painting and will be starting the color layer this week, yay!

We started with a open grisaille or underpainting using only Burnt Umber to work out the value range. This stage is fun as it goes so quickly and is done in one session so you really feel like you have accomplished a lot.

The second stage is the closed grisaille using paint mixed in even values of neutral gray from dark to light, or values 1 to 10. Even though we paint over top of the Burnt Umber layer, the first layer affects the second just as the second layer will affect the third or color layer.

So this week we start the color layers, which can be tricky. The great thing about this method is that at each stage of the process we are able to better judge our subject, the value range, painting handling etc so that by the time we get to the color layer, we can just focus mainly on color which take a lot of the pressure off!